Even GPU mining did not last long, and soon miners found another way to perform mining using FPGAs. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is basically an integrated circuit that can be programmed to perform specific operations. FPGAs are usually programmed in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs), such as Verilog and VHDL. Double SHA-256 quickly became an attractive programming task for FPGA programmers and several open source projects started too. FPGA offered much better performance as compared to GPUs; however, issues such as accessibility, programming difficulty, and the requirement for specialized knowledge to program and configure FPGAs resulted in a short life of the FPGA era for bitcoin mining.
The arrival of ASICs resulted in ...
